The purpose of my talk is to share a new possibility for the future regarding users’ personal data that most have not yet explored. It sits between the two extremes of a familiar spectrum.

On one end, “Do not track” using technology and a legal mandate to prevent any data collection.

AND

On the other end, “Business as usual” leaving the door open for ever more “innovative” pervasive and intrusive data collection and cross referencing.

There is a third possibility that aligns with peoples’ privacy needs as well as offering enormous business opportunities.

A nascent but growing industry of personal data storage services is emerging. These strive to allow individuals to collect their own personal data to manage it and then give permissioned access to their digital footprint to the business and services they choose—businesses they trust to provide better customization, more relevant search results, and real value for the user from their data.

With other leading industry thinkers, I have come to believe that there is more money to be made in an ecosystem that allows users to determine which businesses have access to what data,and under what terms and conditions, than there is under present more diffused, scattershot, and unethical collection systems. Today I will articulate the broad outlines of this emerging “personal data ecosystem” and talk about developments in the industry.

Those of you who know me will find it unusual for me to have such a keen focus on making money on user data and emerging business models.

I am, after all, known as the “Identity Woman – Saving the World with User-Centric Identity”. Since first learning about issues around identity technologies online in 2003, I have been an end user advocate and industry catalyst.

It is really scary these days in credit card land.
I am staying with Liz Lawley and shared it with me. Guy gets lots of credit card applications mailed to him. He decides to run and experiment. He rips one of them up tapes it back together then puts his parents address on it and his cel phone number and mails it in to see if they will give him a card. THEY DO and he uses his cel phone number to activate.

Basically any theif can steal your credit card applicaitons and get cards in your name mailed to them at any address and use a cel phone to activate.
We have some major security flaws to fix in this world.

What do your customers want? Make sure you ask them before you make assumptions. Look at this and its implications:

BC Capital Markets just ran two surveys, one of “mobility experts” who were attending its recent Mobility Evolution Conference, and one of mobile consumers, with alarming results. The “experts” clearly believed that consumers want video products for their mobile phones (63%), and overwhelmingly believed that consumers would tolerate advertising on their phones (72% ). Unfortunately, the same questions elicited quite different results from users, where only 23% expressed any interest in watching video on their mobile phones, and just 20% said they would tolerate cell phone advertising, and that’s only if it lowered their costs. The telecom industry has a long tradition of cluelessness with regard to what its customers really want (metered ISDN, WAP, walled garden portals…), so this really shouldn’t come as a big surprise.

Andy gave me a ride down here and we talked about the announcement last week of DataTao.

DataTao is going to be an interoperable data hub for user controlled data. DataTao is primarily about programmatic access to an individualâ€™s data and only has as much UI as is needed to richly support its base functionality.

So why do I call it an â€˜interoperableâ€™ data hub? Thatâ€™s because DataTao is designed to act as a bridge between many of the current identity protocols. While DataTao will provide storage for people that donâ€™t have their data stored and available from elsewhere, its main purpose is to consume and forward data from its authoritative source(s).

It is my opinion that DataTao is a necessary and required next step in the evolution of the DataWeb. While DataTao by itself is NOT a compelling application it is a needed piece of infrastructure. It will hopefully encourage and enable people to build internet 2.0 applications and maximize the leverage of those already built.

In order to drive adoption DataTao will provide some Apps that use the DataWeb for persistence in conjunction with the DataTao launch. These apps have not been finalized yet but will likely include Exchange and Mac Mail integration (Self updating address books) as well as a rich interface for person to person profile information sharing (i-share).

I got to meet Ajay of AmSoft for the first time and see the i-names being used on the a cell phone. This is push to communicate asserting preferred mode of communication.